As good as dead, and I think that might have been the one thing, in my life, I was supposed to do, but it was hard, so I married someone else.

But he's just a symbol, anyway. I keep falling love with the theory of the same guy, blue eyes and blond hair, doomed and idealistic, close enough. The original version survived Iraq and volunteered as a firefighter. They've all got drug problems and they all ended up in the military. I don't know if it's Byronic or redneck but at this rate it's only semantic.Current Mood: yeah I'm drunk, so what

01:50 pm - okay then!1. Or maybe you're just surfing, I don't know. I doubt that I would ever have the nerve to be disappointed by anything ever again, if I found out that you were just surfing all along. I mean, how great.

2. So the stars are aligning, and I'm running out of useful comments, just glad for the show. It must have been so exhausting, trying to fight that long stretch of perfect circumstances. I'm going to send you a card, I think, if it doesn't happen on its own (it will), just a pale pink heart on front and "Tell him" inside. Because if you don't, you're going to start seeing him in other people's faces, and the set of certain blue eyes is going to drive you crazy, man.

Sometimes I forget how kind and surprising the world can be.Current Mood: safe

This guy, oh man. I almost sat next to him coming on, but he was leaning over onto the seat next to him, like he had his arm around someone invisible, and I didn't want to intrude. Turns out he was trying to sleep, with an elbow on the back of the seats and his hand half over his face. I think what made me look twice at first was that I thought he had something in his mouth, but it was actually this big, brown scar on his top and bottom lip, kind of jagged like a dog bite. And he looked kind of rough and so fed up with everything, like he was about to, I don't know, kick out a window and dive out. But he was tired, right, so fuck that, and his arm kept slipping off the back of the seats and he would sort of wake up, you know, like a little kid.

But he was forty years old, maybe, or thirty five. He had this sort of red blond hair and a dorky tweed blazer and a blue collar shirt and these awful navy pants, and, oh man, this security tag pinned to his pocket, with a picture of himself in a suit on it. I wanted to pull it off, read it and start following him around on a regular basis. He was a wreck, like an out all night drinking wreck, only coming from work, and I feel you, dude. Completely tragic, and he had a gold wedding band. Just looked like he wanted to kill himself, or at least get some goddamn rest.

Most exciting thing that's happened to me in months. Years?

Cocourt, I miss you every day. I keep listening to the radio station do-gooders who are planning on mailing cards to soldiers, because you're over there now, really are, and I think, I don't know, you'd probably get mine. I'd sign my real name, anyway, and ask about you.Current Mood: in love again

07:45 pm - and I was left with my books about youCocourt, I've fallen in love with someone else. He's just like you, only simpler, fighting a different war. Also a hundred pounds heavier and richer by miles.

Last night I dreamed that I called everything off. I caught my husband kissing a girl. Well, I didn't so much catch, as shifted my eyes to the side and saw him doing it. We were all sitting on a bed and he felt obliged to kiss her, and for awhile I tolerated it, maybe even enthralled by the prospect of him doing something so bold, but eventually I felt insulted, got up and left.

Storming away, I took my wedding ring off and put in my pocket, a melodramtic satisfaction. Immediately I was concerned with the possibility of losing it, the imbalance of the circle and the small heavy diamond so much more vulnerable off of my finger. He was apologetic, followed me wonderingly to the post office, where I opened my box (the college mailbox of course, I always seem to be looking for you there, in dreams) and found a series of books I had ordered about you.

He knew instantly, and I was ashamed. Though I had already ended it myself, because of his much more merciless indiscretion, it was clearly all my fault.

I followed him away, guiltily aware of an eagerness to be alone and read about you. You were on the covers in blues and greens, wearing your uniform, a helmet, holding a gun.

Cocourt, he's fighting a war, like you. Neither of you knows why, but I won't hold you to it. I'll know why for you, and love you better for not wanting to figure it out.

03:42 pmCocourt, I have turned you into someone else. It happens to all of you boys, eventually, in my memory. Mostly you are better in abstract (though still a pain in the ass in my dreams), but I do miss your eyes, your actual eyes - I can't envision them clearly and I could never do them justice with happy invention.

I don't believe for a minute that it's the same girl. Why does male sexuality feel so violent sometimes? I suppose it always was. The idea that it would have been bred out of them through evolution is simply preposterous; antithetical to biology.

I had two dreams last night, or at least two stages of the same dream. In one I found Calvin sitting on a counter at a hospital, smiling blissfully up from a little brown carton. There was a black woman behind the counter, a nurse I would guess. I asked her:

"Is this one mine?" and she answered Yes. She asked me what I would name him, as if I had just given birth to him and was picking him up, having nearly forgotten. I told her Calvin, confidently, then stuttered over his middle name, wanting it to be Daniel but thinking it should be Douglas, after my husband's father.

In the second part of the dream I found a note from Melissa written in some obscure place, something about she wanting to patch up our friendship. I looked up after reading it and there she was, waving to me demurely, reverted to fifteen and free of her born again values.

That I could have woken to both of them, and not my husband? At least in the morning light I would have answered easily, Please.Current Mood: artfully resigned